On Wed, May 2, 2007 at 7:22 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2 May 2007, Jim Jewett wrote:
>> > So to clarify, what you are asking for is the removal
>> > of the feature defined in HTML4 which allows certain
>> > tags to be omitted in certain unambiguous situations?
>> Yes.
>> And if that is too radical, at least reduce the number
>> of such permitted omissions.
> Could you elaborate on why you think that it is bad to
> have tags be omitted?
I think I dropped this at the time, because I couldn't easily explain
it except in terms of cleanliness, or safety margins.
But it started bugging me again when I read
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/markup-spec/
Section 3.6 would be much simpler if it didn't have to worry about
optional and implied tags.
Section 3.8 would almost disappear.
At the very least, it would be nice to simplify the rules regarding
when a tag could be omitted. For example:
"""
A body element's end tag may be omitted if the body element is not
immediately followed by a comment and the element is either not empty
or its start tag has not been omitted.
"""
Why so much work to avoid moving a comment from after the body to
inside? If body can be omitted, then why can't an empty body by
omitted?
-jJ